The Complex World of Tomato Sauce

I was stunned to read the following in Oprah magazine's Feb. 2006 issue:

"Is Plastic Affecting our Fertility?"
"The findings: Bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical in plastics that mimics estrogen, causes health problems in animals at far lower doses than most people are exposed to every day.

What you need to know: Polycarbonate, the hard plastic that contains BPA, is found in many products, including baby bottles and the inside coating of food cans. Heating and repeated washing can cause leaching, and significant levels of the chemicals have been measured in humans. Of the 115 animal studies reviewed in a recent Environmental Health Perspectives article, 94 showed that even small amounts of BPA can cause fertility problems, hyperactivity, altered immune function, and early sexual maturation. Plastics makers maintain their products are sage (of the 11 industry-sponsored studies, none found evidence of harm), but there are efforts to ban BPA from children's goods. Frederick vom Saal, PdD, the paper's lead author, called BPA "a poster chemical for ADHD" and recommends avoiding foods sterilized in the can, such as tomatoes ("massive amounts of BPA," he says). Also be cautious using clear plastic baby bottles--find out more at www.environmentcalifornia.org."

I've found some interesting organic tomato sauces in glass jars that I've been using in our cooking at home, and we've been ordering much less pizza and spaghetti when out.

My friend Julia has also tracked down how much BPA is in the bottled water we are getting from Alhambra water due to the sterilization process which super heats the bottles, which leech BPA into the drinking water we were buying because we thought it was safer. More on that in further posts.

What to have for dinner?

As if this topic wasn't hard enough to answer already! Recently I've been delving into the world of what we should, and shouldn't, be putting into our bodies. A few rather shocking discoveries that have changed the way I feed the family...as well as some tricks I've figured out in how to avoid them.

I'll start with fish...the good, the bad, the ugly. After having my vegetarian-fish-eating Pilates trainer out for 18 months with mercury poisoning from eating fish, I started to pay much more attention to this area. Basically, you don't want to eat anything big...because they eat everything else in the sea and the mercury from the whole food chain gets concentrated in the fatty tissue. (This problem will only get worse and more and more mercury-spewing coal-fired power plants come into existence.)

And then there is salmon. Wild salmon is fine, health-wise, as they are relatively small. The problem comes in when they are farmed...they are fed pelleted fish from scraps of much larger fish that contain mercury and residual PCBs. Which are then concentrated in the salmon. So you'd think the answer would be to eat only wild salmon.

I thought so too until I read the enlightening New York Times (4/10/2005) article that tested "wild" salmon purchased from a range of stores in New York, including Dean and Deluca. 8 of the 10 samples obtained were in fact farmed, being sold as wild. Digging deeper, it seems that the only safe salmon is from Alaska. Now I am only buying salmon from a boat directly, or smoked salmon from Alaska...as I'm betting that they can't lie about that provenance as easily.

I think this is a good option, but I am looking at it more closely and will report back. I recently was talking with the seafood buyer for The Pasta Shop in Berkeley and she recently found out that much "wild" salmon is actually from farms...in the ocean. Still being fed the same problematic feed. Now I need to find out whether there are any ocean fish farms in Alaska...

Great resource: The Seafood Watch list from the Monterey Bay Aquarium http://www.mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp